I have two friends that have died, another on oxygen (probably for the rest of his life), and another who is seeing a cardiologist at McKay Dee for heart damage caused by COVID. All under age 55 and healthy; none of them vaccinated. I don't know a single person who was hospitalized with COVID that was fully vaccinated.
Far more important than my experiences are those of my younger brother who spent the summer on the Critical Care Team at Orlando Regional. He knows all too well about the percentage of people he saw on an ECMO machine, ventilated, or lose their life from COVID that were vaccinated verse unvaccinated.
The summer surge in Florida was so bad that he once spent 13 days without seeing a single patient that was conscious; they were all in medically-induced comas. At one point he had five young women, all pregnant, on ECMO (heart/lung) machines and not a single one was vaccinated. I called him late one night after reading some of the opinions on MM and 15 of his 16 patients that night were unvaccinated. This isn't FNC/CNN stuff, this is a conversation with my brother who was literally there. These are as real as the numbers can be.
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Just take a minute and think what it would be like working all day going from room to room of sick and dying patients, knowing that nine out of ten of them will not live to come off that ventilator. You make one last walk down the dim hallway to the ECMO rooms before you go home to get a few hours of sleep. You know you have to be back for your next shift in only six hours and you're exhausted.
You quietly slip into a room where a 26 year old girl lies unconscious in a bed surrounded by balloons and flowers. No family is with her because she has COVID and guests aren't allowed. There are pictures taped to the walls of a vibrant young woman, so different from the one in front of you, smiling with her husband and three young kids. Just last week they were playing together in the backyard.
She doesn't know it yet, but she hemorrhaged earlier that morning and the surgeons had to take her baby, the little boy didn't make it. The damage from the hemorrhage means she'll never have another child but right now you're just trying to save her life and get her home to her family.
Really, there's nothing you can do but wait to see if her body recovers from the damage caused by the virus and the trauma she's experienced. You say a silent prayer that one day she'll wake up; her kids need their mommy.
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In a moment of exhaustion, frustration, anger, loneliness and helplessness my brother had to step out of the room to a quiet hallway where his emotions rushed to the surface. At that moment, another physician walked up to him, put his arm around my brother and said, "If you ever lose this feeling, you need to quit medicine."
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The doctors in that hospital have treated hundreds of COVID patients over the last few years, and the far, far majority of them have been unvaccinated. Hospitals all over the country have experienced the same thing.
Anybody that says vaccinations don't work simply is ignorant of facts. ICU doctors don't preach vaccinations because of their stock portfolio, that's absurd, they preach it because they all have stories just like my brother and they know how preventable so much of this suffering really is.
If you don't want to get vaccinated, don't. But don't be the ******* that spreads BS online.
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